The CLC was overrun with monkeys 2 weeks ago, as two year 4 classes from Sir Harold Jackson School arrived in order to animate the story Monkey Do, Monkey See. The classes read the story as part of a literacy project at school, then they made some beautiful sets and props to bring to the CLC. Once here they animated the story using Stop Motion Pro – not my favourite animation software, but the one we have for the PCs. Whilst one group was animating, the other group used Comic Life to create a comic strip version of the story, then they swapped at lunchtime. The groups will finish their animations at school, using Windows Movie Maker to add titles, credits, voiceovers and music.

The students worked really well together in their groups, and managed to create some fantastic animations, as you can see below. Their teacher said,

“The children thoroughly enjoyed themselves and were actively involved in both activities, which ran very smoothly.”

a powerful research tool and a knowledge-sharing community.

At heart it’s a social bookmarking tool. This means you can bookmark all your favourite webpages, and not only can you access this list of bookmarks from any computer with internet access (so if you constantly change classrooms, or want to access something you found at home it is ideal), but you can share the list with your pupils. On top of that, you can actually highlight sections of a web page and leave sticky notes for your pupils. Equally you can set them off doing some research and leaving their own notes on the pages for their fellow students to learn from.

Diigo has a special educators free upgrade (see here) which means you can create pupil accounts, without the need for personal e-mails, and the accounts are automatically private except within the class group.

For more information read this excellent blog post on using Diigo in education by José Picardo, a Modern Languages teacher in Nottingham.

A Year 3 class from Sir Harold Jackson came to the CLC to complete a project on weather and climate. Groups of pupils wrote weather reports and extreme weather warnings to act out in front of the green screen. Other groups researched climate change to create a multimedia poster using Glogster. Unfortunately Glogster couldn’t deal with a large number of people accessing it at the same time and so we ended up using PowerPoint instead.

A Year 3 class from Norton Free Primary School wrote their own Mr. Men and Little Miss stories at school, then created hand drawn sets and characters to bring to the centre. At the CLC they worked in groups using I Can Animate and iMovie on Apple Macbooks to animate their stories in two dimensions. Animation is always a difficult skill for young children, as it involves good teamwork to agree how the story will progress, attention to detail and a lot of patience. The end result is always worth it though, as you can see by the example below:

Year 5 pupils from Sharrow School came to the CLC to recreate life in Victorian Britain. They came with costumes and props and acted out scenes inspired by the book Street Child by Berlie Doherty in the form of news reports. These were filmed in front of the green screen, so that they could use photos of the era as backgrounds. They included stealing from the pie shop, escape from the workhouse and a family being evicted from their house. Following filming, they edited the clips in Windows Movie Maker to create their finished film.

The result looks fantastic, and the pupils all enjoyed the experience. Here is a short audio clip from their teacher: